The statements in this section may serve as a background to help understand the invention and its application and uses, but may not constitute prior art.
In both professional and amateur sports, good coaching is essential for the development of technical, tactical, physical and drill skills, and personalized and targeted training often help improve fitness and performance in a particular sport while reducing chances of injury. Advances in modern computing and networking technology have allowed virtual access to experienced coaches and effective performance training programs, yet existing digital coaching and training applications are either passive in nature, where users or players are provided with instructions or drilling plans only, or function in an offline manner, where video recordings of players in action can be replayed, analyzed, and annotated, manually by a coach or the player, after a training or drill session is completed.
More recently, real-time analytics systems have been developed to provide quantitative and qualitative game and player analytics, with uses in broadcasting, game strategizing, and team management, yet mass mainstream usage of such systems by individual players for customized performance training is still complex and expensive. Real-time tracking technology based on image recognition often requires use of multiple high-definition cameras mounted on top of a game area or play field for capturing visual data from multiple camera arrays positioned at multiple perspectives, calibration for different environments, and massive processing power in high-end desktop and/or server-grade hardware to analyze data from the camera arrays. Accurate tracking of player motion and forms, and real-time automated analysis require vast computational resources that hinder implementations with low-cost, general-purpose hardware with small form factors.
Therefore, it would be an advancement in the state of the art to allow interactive, real-time virtual coaching and performance training, including facilitating training of body-eye coordination and reaction time, using just a mobile device by utilizing video data captured from a camera on the mobile device.
It is against this background that various embodiments of the present invention were developed.